Dearly, Departed

by Lia Habel

“So,” Bram said, “who wants to go first?”

  “No,” Renfield said, flashing him a dirty look. “Not while she’s eating.”

  “Not while I’m eating,” I affirmed, my voice muffled by pastry. “Whatever it is.”

  “Tell her about Z Comp,” Chas said.

  “Sure.” Bram gestured around the caf. “You’re looking at about half of Company Z. Approximately a hundred and thirty dead, maybe twenty living at any one time, including our living captain, James Wolfe. Mix of New Vic and Punk folks, though we’re technically on NV land.”

  I swallowed and asked, “Where’s the other half?”

  “Out on patrol,” Chas said. “They got a call after our half headed north to get you, and Wolfe went with them. Usual deal, just some bad zoms to take care of.”

  “We’re all one squad here,” Bram went on. “We’re the youngest, so they sort of group us together for most things.”

  “The children of the golden glitch,” Tom said, fluttering his fingers toward the ceiling.

  I stared at him, lips halfway to a cup of tea. Without moving my head, I looked at Bram, who laughed. “Talk about myths.”

  “Hey, I think there might be something to it,” Tom replied, as he lowered his hand.

  “What?” I asked Bram.

  “Some of the soldiers have this theory that if they had an evil, undead twin somewhere in the world, and both people were weighed, the good one would come out twenty-one grams heavier than the bad one.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The soul,” Tom said. “There’s an old yarn says the soul weighs twenty-one grams. The golden glitch, the happy accident that makes it safe for you to sit here and eat cinnamon rolls without thinking that maybe you’re stuffing yourself like a turkey for us to carve up. If we didn’t have souls, you’d be toast. Literally, you’d be our breakfast.”

  I dropped the Danish I was holding and forced myself to finish swallowing the suddenly hard, thick lump of food I’d been working on. I half thought it’d kill me.

  “Tom, not cool,” Bram said, narrowing his eyes.

  Tom grinned toothily. “What? I thought it was clever.”

  “You suck,” Chas said, “so bad. My God.”

  “Okay, okay, I’m sorry.”

  I’d lost my appetite. I pushed the tray away. “Okay, then. How do I fit in?” Fueled by sugar and a little caffeine, I was relieved to find that whatever ability I’d ever had to make my voice sound grown-up had returned.

  Bram asked, “Fit in?”

  “To all this. To the army. To … Company Z.”

  Tom and Coalhouse shared a look. “Uh,” Coalhouse said, confused, “you don’t.”

  I shook more hair out of my eyes. “You need to find my father. I figure I do, too. Sounds to me like I’d better be included somewhere.”

  “Nora, we’d be very grateful for your help,” Bram said. “But you’re not a member of Z Comp.”

  “Yeah, you’re alive,” Chas pointed out. “Clearly, you’re overqualified.”

  I sat on my hip to look at Bram directly. Time to dial the stubbornness up to eleven. “I want to join. I want to help. I shot a zombie back on the roof—two! And given everything I’ve dealt with so far? You owe me.”

  “Nora, you can’t enlist in Company Z,” he said.

  “Why? Because I’m a girl?”

  Chas waved her hand. “Nope! Ovaries are welcome here, so long as they’re useless!”

  “Why, then?” I bumped my fists lightly on the table. “Look, I am furious about my father right now. I want to get him back. I want him to explain a few things to me, before I beat the prion-whatevers out of him. So, how do I join up and get out there?”

  Bram cracked his neck and glanced at Tom, who lifted an eyebrow, silently asking whether he had permission to go on, before saying, “You can’t join because we’re meant to be expendable.”

  “Huh?”

  “Any other unit, they’d have a policy that told your fellow soldiers to go after your pretty little rump and bring you back, dead or alive, if you got in any kind of trouble.” Tom pointed at me. “Here, somebody drops or goes missing, we’re officially ordered to leave them behind.”

  Bram picked up the ball. “You enlist, somehow get them to assign you to this company—let’s ignore the ten billion reasons that neither of these things will ever happen—and that policy applies to you, too.”

  It took a moment for this to sink in. I’d never heard of such a thing before. I’d never seen anything like it in any of my holos. I’d heard plenty of stories about the heroic efforts made to retrieve fallen comrades. They didn’t have that here?

  As if they needed any more reasons to be depressed.

  “That’s … heartless,” I whispered.

  Chas quirked her upper lip. “Well, figure it their way. They send a living guy against a zombie, there’s always a chance that he’ll get the Laz, die, and turn on them. It’s like sending soldiers to the enemy side. They send a zombie against a zombie, though, it’s just a question of who wins.”

  “But my father would never—”

  “No, the doc wouldn’t ever think of us that way,” Coalhouse chipped in. “But he had to justify saving us and keeping us around somehow.”

  Tom nodded. “A couple years ago the NV higher-ups got tired of working with the Punks. They figured they should undertake one last big joint project and just exterminate us all. Stop playing footsie. Set the earth on fire, or something—kill all the zombies and get back to their old dispute. Go big and go home. Was your dad who convinced ’em to try using us first. Thought we could continue to keep the whole zombie thing quiet that way. He figured eventually living soldiers wouldn’t even have to know about the undead—an infestation’d pop up on the radar, we’d ninja in and take care of it. Surgical zombie-v-zombie warfare, public kept ignorant, life is beautiful.”

  Coalhouse put a period on it. “We’ve been doing our best ever since. Building up our numbers.”

  “We’re weapons, Nora,” Bram said. “Very expensive, fussed-over weapons, but to the larger government we’re nothing more. And like weapons, they figure in the budget that they’ll lose a few of us.”

  “Nobody in the army spends a great deal of time trying to fish a gun out of a river,” Ren said, cracking open his book again. “Far easier to buy a new one.”

  It wasn’t just Bram’s face that was impassive during this exchange. All of them appeared used to the idea, comfortable with it, even as it horrified me. They were either incredibly downtrodden or incredibly strong.

  The sensation of mild envy I was feeling told me I had already decided it was the latter.

  I rolled my shoulders. “Well, I guess it’s up to me not to require rescuing, then.”

  The others looked at me incredulously. Bram took a breath just as the door to the mess thundered open.

  “Griswold!” a voice bellowed.

  “We’ll talk about this later,” he said, then climbed to his feet and stood at attention. “Sir!”

  I turned around, only to be confronted with the largest man I had ever seen in my life.

  The end was nigh.

  Nora stood up beside me. I hoped she wouldn’t notice how stiff I was, or how my hand itched to salute. I didn’t need her to question me right now—everything had been going so well.

  Wolfe was the real captain here, though, and we were all fully aware of it.

  The sound of fifty soldiers standing and saluting echoed in the mess. Wolfe passed them all with nary a sideways glance. His eyes were on me, and as usual, I couldn’t tell if he was really angry or merely alive. He was a gigantic man, easily seven feet tall and built like a bull. His uniform was like a wall of night approaching us.

  “Griswold,” he said, stopping on a dime before our table. I nodded. He turned his attention to Nora, who lifted her chin and set her face in an expression of determination. “Miss Dearly. How … surprising … to see you up and about.” His eyes swept over her guns. “And
… armed.”

  “Thank you, Captain,” she said with a little dip of her head. “Is there any news of my father?”

  “Not only armed, but aware.” Wolfe shot me a look that could melt steel. “Actually, there is. We managed to track down his coordinates. Somehow he ended up going south, and we are extending our search in that direction.”

  I looked at Nora and smiled. “See? It’s going to be all right.”

  Wolfe shushed me with a twitch of his brow. “I wish to speak with you at some point, Miss Dearly, regarding your father. But first I must conference with Griswold here. If you’ll excuse us.”

  Nora sucked a breath in through her teeth and looked up at me, the hard expression in her eyes melting away. “Bram …”

  Wolfe’s nostrils flared, as though he could smell weakness. “Is something the matter?”

  “No, sir.” I thought fast, and said, “Miss Dearly, if I take you back to the med facilities, would you feel better waiting there?”

  Nora nodded so fast I was surprised her head didn’t fall off.

  “Miss Dearly has proven remarkably adaptable,” I said, turning my attention back to Wolfe. “But surely it would be far better to let her remain where she’s comfortable.”

  The captain rolled a hand and said, “Make it fast. I’ll await you in my office.” He turned and stalked off. Walking through the crowd of soldiers, he looked like a Titan going for a stroll in the woods, head far above the trees.

  “Thank you,” Nora whispered.

  “Don’t mention it.” I raised my voice and waved to my friends. “Be back in a bit.”

  “Nice meeting you, Nora,” Chas said.

  “Yes, it was lovely,” Ren added.

  Nora flashed them a nervous little smile and stepped closer to me. I allowed myself to bask in her unspoken trust for a split second before leading her outside again.

  “What do you think he wants to talk to you about?” she asked once we were alone.

  “Oh, a lot of things. I’m pretty much a goner.” I put my hands in my pockets.

  Nora’s brows drew together. “Goner? What have you done wrong?”

  “He told me, right after we got you in hand, to keep you in your dad’s office and not tell you anything. So basically I’m in trouble for everything that happened from the moment you woke up onward.”

  “Why didn’t you do what he said?”

  “Because we knew you’d freak out, and I didn’t want to have to deal with that,” I said. “And it wouldn’t have been fair to you. You deserve better.”

  “Thank you,” she said, her tone serious.

  “Welcome.” I chuckled. “And then there’s the fact that he just wanted us to march into the Fields, blow stuff up, and march out again. I wanted to see if you’d opt to come with me first, but then those coppers showed up. I figured it’d be less dramatic than, you know, an army descending upon the suburbs. Didn’t work out so well, though.”

  Nora actually giggled. “Coppers aren’t always fast. You probably could have just scooped me up and run for the hills.”

  I paused at the big steel doors and ignored the memories her innocent words conjured up for me. “Nah. That would have led them right to us. Besides,” I added, trying to joke again, “you were putting up quite a fight.”

  For an instant Nora looked up at me from her tiny height—before she uttered an awkward little laugh and shoved me in the chest. “Yeah, and after all this? I’d like to see you ever catch me again!” And with that she was gone, the doors bumping together behind her.

  I stared at the doors until they stopped moving. She really needed to not do things like that.

  Laz was thrilled at the idea of chasing her, and priming my muscles for the task.

  I stood there until I was fairly sure I was composed, before finally making my way to Wolfe’s office.

  Wolfe kept his quarters on the second story of the barracks across from mine. The base’s main office was housed beneath, staffed by unlucky and unhappy soldiers on an alternating basis. The woman there today, with a purplish complexion and a web of scars across her cheek, watched disinterestedly as I entered and ascended the stairs. I rapped on the door.

  “Come in.”

  This time, I saluted in his presence. “Sir.”

  “Sit, Griswold.” Wolfe was puffing on a cigar, and acrid smoke filled the room. He finished tapping out a few commands on his stainless steel, round-buttoned keyboard as I took a seat. I noticed that scraps of vegetation still clung to his uniform and that the blood vessels of his hands were mapped out by insect bites.

  “You have ten seconds to tell me why I shouldn’t have you marched against the fence and shot for directly disobeying my orders again,” he said.

  “I’ll admit that I did disobey orders, and I apologize,” I said. “But if we’d done it your way, sir, the girl wouldn’t be comfortable enough to sit in the mess hall with fifty-odd undead people. She’d be too scared. She’s …” Amazing. “… coping.”

  Wolfe finally looked at me. His eyes were bloodshot. “Did Elpinoy know about this?”

  I said nothing. I wasn’t about to sell anybody down the river. Not even Dick.

  Wolfe tapped his ash out. His movements were slow and tense, and I expected he wanted to rip me a new one. “Griswold, you’re fairly fresh. Your brain isn’t too much like Swiss cheese yet. You don’t even look that dead. Why do you have such a tough time following directions?”

  “I have a tough time following directions that don’t make sense. That’ll end in someone getting hurt.”

  “Why? You’re already dead. What d’you care?”

  I didn’t say anything. I didn’t trust myself.

  Wolfe puffed on his cigar and sat there like an idling dragon, milky smoke escaping his nostrils. “The girl’s latched onto you, has she?” he eventually asked.

  “I doubt you could say that, sir. I’m just the one she’s had the most contact with.”

  “Hmm.” He eyed me narrowly. “Just don’t get too comfortable with it. You’re not her little pal, Griswold. You’re a monster. Remember that.”

  My jaw clenched. “Sir.”

  “Now, I need to discuss something with you that will not leave this room.”

  “Understood.”

  He turned his computer screen around and hit a button, starting a video feed.

  At first, I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. The video was a jumble of disconnected scenes—ten-second slices of video, pooled from a variety of sources. There were street shots, shots from the interiors of buildings. Slowly, I recognized landmarks from the site of the extraction. Nothing seemed off; the video appeared to show people in the Elysian Fields going about their business.

  Then came a man shuffling, aimlessly, down a street. A young woman collapsing behind a baby carriage, coughing so furiously that her body rattled.

  Comprehension crashed through me, and I gripped the arms of my chair.

  The Lazarus had been unleashed in the Elysian Fields.

  I didn’t want to believe it. I forced myself to think logically. As the scenes clicked by, I watched for signs of rioting and violence. I didn’t see any. I saw children playing in a park. Women exiting a market. Street-sweepers at work.

  Then the video cut to a shot, taken from a camera mounted in an alleyway, of a well-heeled, velvet-clad woman nestling her head almost lovingly into the intestines of a doorman, his cap sitting in a pool of his own blood.

  Jesus.

  “Your men didn’t get them all, Griswold,” Wolfe said in a low, dangerous tone.

  “I wasn’t there!” I fought out. “We accompanied Miss Dearly onto the Christine! The others were to clean up and come on the Erika!”

  “Are you trying to pass the blame off, Griswold?”

  “No,” I whispered. “No.” I watched the screen for a few more long, horrifying seconds before standing up. “We’ll get on it. Now. We’ll—”

  “Sit down!” Wolfe said, lifting his voice. He twirled the scre
en so it faced away from me. “Put your bones back in that chair, soldier.”

  “But the longer we wait, the more civilians they’ll kill!” I shouted.

  Wolfe drew on his cigar, held it, and let the smoke waft out with his words. “They’re putting the Elysian Fields on complete lockdown. Going to spin it as biological warfare—which I suppose it is. Some of our living forces are returning from the border, and should be arriving within the hour. They’re gonna clean that place up.”

  My jaw dropped, and I wouldn’t have been too terribly shocked if it had actually fallen on the floor. “They’re sending the living against the dead? That’s suicide! That’s what we’re here for!”

  “You were never meant to go within twenty miles of significant settlements or living troops,” Wolfe said, stone-faced. “Not yet anyway. I send you in one time—one time—and look what happens. All because you don’t listen to me. All because you think you know better than me!”

  I punched my fists together and tried to think.

  “I’ve been told to expect orders to split you up, send you out to the new infestations. Damn zombies are crawling farther and farther north … this whole thing’s gonna blow wide open soon enough. Damn Dearly and his humanitarianism—you ain’t even human! And now I have to worry about finding the idiot!”

  My fingers curled and uncurled as I began to pace around the office. “We have to tell Miss Dearly.”

  Wolfe’s cigar exploded on the desk with the full force of his fist pounding behind it. “You say nothing to that girl, you got it?”

  I turned on him. I could feel anger causing my dead heart muscles to throb out of sync with each other. It stung. “That’s her hometown! She has friends there, family! You can’t tell me you’re not going to let her know!”

  The captain made his way around his desk and stopped with his face very close to mine. I forced myself to maintain my position and meet the embers of his eyes. I didn’t care if he was pissed off—I’d show him pissed off.

  “Our mission, until I receive orders to relocate you, is to keep her safe and find her father. Nothing else. You tell that girl a word of this, I will send you south so fast your teeth will spin. Or, if I’m feeling my oats, I may just shoot you. You want that? You want to leave her here alone? Say a word, that’s what happens. You get the back of a truck or a blind date with a bullet.”